Getting Mac OS X up and running on a computer without an Apple label has always been a bit of a hassle. You needed customised Mac OS X disks, updates would ruin all your hard work, and there was lots of fiddling with EFI and the likes. Ever since the release of boot-132, this is no longer the case. Read on for how setting up a "Hack"intosh really is as easy as 1, 3, 2.

OSX can utilize HyperThreading. After all, when Steve Jobs first told the world that Apple had been cooking up OSX on x86 boxes for a while the minimus sys requirements was a P4 with HT (since those were what the development boxes Apple had used). For more on HyperThreading as it aplies now see here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947-5.html

I can confirm that HT works under OSX, on *an* Atom (N230) because that's what lives in my OSX-enabled Mini 9 netbook, a boot-132 vanilla install, and HT is running fine. It's more probable that there's some issue with both HT and dualcore + Atom, since the 330 has both of those features (check processorfinder.intel.com if you don't believe me), although I will note that the new Nehalem-based Mac Pros utilise HT to deliver 8- or 16-thread capability on single- and dual-quadcore systems.

It's a common issue with osx86 to have to set cpus=1 under certain chipsets/procs, so I'm guessing that OSX's SMP implementation simply isn't as universal as, say, Linux or Windows. And why would it have to be? After all, it only needs to run on Macs